The Conscience of the King

He and Mannion had been inside Coke's house. Slight though it had been, it had calmed the dust and placed little diamonds of light on the crazy, leaning rooftops.

Mannion looked enquiringly at Gresham, who had halted and was gazing abstractedly up at the sky. Then, to Mannion's surprise, he turned on his heels and started to walk. In the wrong direction. Mannion swung his eyes around instinctively. No one was watching them, or no one doing so obviously. No sudden interest in the fine gentleman and his purse walking down the street, no nods between two or three men with one setting off to bump into Gresham while another cut his purse from his belt. Reassured, Mannion set off" after his master.

They were going to The Globe, the round 'o' of a building with its centre open to the elements. It was late afternoon when they reached their destination, that afternoon's performance finished, the crowd long gone and evening already starting to set in.

'What are we doing here?' muttered Mannion. He could see the reason for their long walk if there was a play to see, but no reason at all to visit an empty shell of a building.

'Looking,' said Gresham absent-mindedly. 'Just looking.' A theatre was naturally easy to defend, he was thinking. Entrances were kept down to a minimum so that everyone who went through one had to pay, and the high, outside walls of the building had little need for windows. It was that time of day when no lantern was strictly needed to guide the way, but its warmth would still have glowed in the failing light. Gresham went to one of the narrow ground level entrances. The wood was thick but scarred and dry, leached with age. Gresham tried the iron handle, rattled the door. The great white curtain wall of the theatre was cross-hatched with the squares of its timber beams, standing out more and more as the gloom deepened. There was give between the latch and its lock, enough for a crowbar to wrench it open, but it was secure against anything except a direct and brutal assault. It was quiet now, especially after the noise and yelling bustle of the great city on the other side of the river, and Gresham waited while the echoes of iron on iron could be heard to ricochet around the vast empty space of The Globe. Nothing moved. No one stirred.

Gresham looked enquiringly at Mannion.

'Someone killed the porter here not so long ago?' Mannion asked. 'Glad they've tightened up their security.' He spat thoughtfully into the damp earth at his feet, looking carefully to see that his spittle was clear. Satisfied, he hitched his belt up round his tunic and waited for Gresham to decide what to do next.

They started to walk round the girth of The Globe. Others would have looked for a lantern, for servants to guard them. There was a casual ease to Gresham's walk, his hand carelessly on the hilt of his sword, and clear menace in the bulk of Mannion. An onlooker would have sensed why these men needed no extra guard.

The theatre seemed deserted, silent. Like all great buildings that come alive when thousands throng into them, there was an almost death-like concentration to its stillness when empty, a sense of artificiality and yet of a great beast sleeping. Why did some buildings have a sense of history being made in them, thought Gresham, while others, outwardly more important, seem bland and inert?

They reached full circle. No sign of a new porter. Was he safely locked away inside, too terrified by recent events to explore the noise by the door? What had happened on the night of the murder? Had a door been left unlocked, by accident or on purpose? Had the porter been called to the door or had he known the person who had summoned him? Had it been someone already inside the theatre who had turned on the old man?

Too many questions, sighed Gresham. There always were too many questions. He had learned to stop the rampaging flow of his mind, haul himself back, restrict his questioning to one answer at a time. Well, there were no answers at The Globe, not yet. Except perhaps one. The King's Men were clearly not expecting a second break-in at their theatre or security would have been positively hanging off" the walls. There was no shortage of ruffians and ex-soldiers to stand guard for those who had enough coin to pay them. Was that an answer in itself? Did it mean that those who ran'the company had some reason to know that there would be no repetition of the break-in?

'Boat?' asked Mannion hopefully. It was their quickest way home, and Mannion hated walking nearly as much as he hated washing. There was not an ounce of excess fat on his great frame but how he kept himself as fit as a twenty-year-old was a mystery to Gresham, who had never seen him voluntarily work up a sweat.

'Boat,' agreed Gresham, his mind still wrestling with what he had seen and the realisation of just how much he did not know.

Behind them, the white mass of The Globe dominated the skyline, enigmatic, silent and empty.